Arthur J. Goldberg

Goldberg, Arthur

Arthur Goldberg, 1908–90, American labor lawyer and jurist, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1962–65), b. Chicago. He received his law degree from Northwestern Univ. in 1929. A corporation lawyer, he became a labor specialist after representing the Chicago newspaper guild in a strike (1938) against the Hearst papers. In World War II he served in the Office of Strategic Services as contact man with the European underground labor movement. He was (1945–48) professor of law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. In 1948 he was appointed by Philip Murray to be general counsel of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the United Steelworkers Union. Goldberg was a central figure in the merger (1955) of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the CIO, and he led the fight to expel the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from the AFL-CIO. Appointed U.S. Secretary of Labor in 1961, he was credited with settling several serious labor disputes. In 1962 he was appointed by President Kennedy to the Supreme Court, where he was one of its more liberal members. He resigned (1965) when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him U.S. representative to the United Nations; he held that post until 1968. In 1970, he was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for governor of New York state. He wrote AFL-CIO: Labor United (1956).